A
video shown on BBC TV on February 11, 2006 shows British soldiers savagely
beating and kicking unarmed Iraqi teenagers in an army compound. Officials
at the Ministry of Defense are said to have investigated and established
beyond doubt the authenticity of the video.

Shot secretly “for
fun” as a home movie from a rooftop in Basra in southern Iraq by a
corporal and shown to friends at a home base in Europe, it was given to
the News of theWorld later by an anonymous whistleblower.
The footage shows soldiers pulling four Iraqi boys in their early teens
into their army base after a riot and beating them with batons, then
punching and kicking them repeatedly on the body and head and between the
legs. Within the space of one minute, some 42 blows are rained on the four
teens whom the whistleblower said “were just kids” who did not even have
on shoes. One soldier can also be seen kicking a dead Iraqi in the face.
The unidentified cameraman can be heard laughing and urging his colleagues
on with vulgarities. (1)

This, mind you, is
kinder, gentler Britain, whose exemplary interaction with the locals at
Basra was held up as a model for American forces. The new video shows this
up for the nonsense it is; the Brits on tape are every bit as gung-ho and
turned on torturers of detainees as the soldiers at Abu Ghraib were.

And under-age
detainees at that. Nothing new there either, of course. Despite all the
breast-beating, the fact remains that the two worst crimes coming out of
the prison scandal (assuming one can make a hierarchy of these things) --
the abuse of children and the complicity of medical personnel -- have yet
to be given anything like serious examination by the fourth estate here.

So now Britain too
is a paid up member of the Axis of Child Abusers.

Paid-up member
two: The US

In July 2004,
Germany’s TV news magazine, Report Mainz, cited accounts by the
International Committee of the Red Cross that there were over 100 children
in US custody and that soldiers had abused children. An eyewitness,
Sergeant Provance, even described how interrogators molested a 15-year old
girl and physically abused a 16-year old boy. (2)

More sensationally,
in a taped lecture at the ACLU during the same summer, veteran
investigative reporter Seymour Hersh claimed that he had heard tapes of
children screaming as they were being sodomized in front of their parents.
(3)

Hersh was late on
the story. Buried in a Denver Post article a few months earlier was
a brief but chilling reference to the rape of a young Iraqi boy by an
American soldier. (4)

Paid-up member
one:
Israel, whose soldiers routinely mow down Palestinian children in their
homes and schools. Just recently, nine-year-old Aya Astal was shot in the
neck and had her stomach blown open when she wandered too close to
Israel’s “security fence.” (5)

But a whole troupe
of little ghosts go before her: Fifth grader Ghadir Mukheimer, a
ten-year-old schoolgirl whom Israeli occupation troops shot in the chest
and killed in October 2004 while she was sitting at her desk inside a
United Nations school in a Gaza refugee camp. (6)

And
thirteen-year-old Iman al-Hams skipping to school, left to die in a pool
of blood when ambulances were denied access. Her body was riddled with 20
bullets -- five to her head -- most pumped into her body after death by
Israeli soldiers. (7)

And four-month-old
Iman Hajjour, killed at Khan Younis refugee camp in southern Gaza Strip by
Israeli shelling that also left her mother and sister seriously injured.
(8)

Officials have
deliberately withheld the name of the regiment to which the perps in the
British video belong. But maybe the public should demand it. Here’s why.

In May 2004, when
photos surfaced in the Daily Mirror (UK) of members of the Queen’s
Lancashire Regiment beating up and urinating on a hooded Iraqi detainee,
General Sir Michael Jackson, Chief of the General Staff, rushed to claim
that they only showed an isolated incident caused by the “ill discipline
of a few soldiers.” But as The Independent pointed out immediately,
by May 2004, the QLR (as well as the Royal Fusiliers and Black Watch) was
already involved in six cases of death or severe abuse that the Royal
Military Police had not yet completed investigated and that dated back
more than a year. In May 2004, it was also eight months since the killing
of 26-year-old Baha Mousa, a hotel receptionist beaten to death in
September 2003 by members of the same QLR. (9)

The QLR was at the
time also facing a charge of having murdered an Iraqi detainee.

But in May 2004, the
editor of the Mirror, Piers Morgan, was actually forced to resign
over the abuse photos published in his paper. A government investigation
-- never actually documented publicly -- found that they were a hoax.
The Mirror’s owners, Trinity Mirror, and several prominent US
corporations which held shares in Trinity, had opposed the Mirror’s
anti-war stance long before the publication of the photos and it was their
pressure that led to Morgan’s sacking on May 14.

Whatever the merits
of the hoax allegation -- and mind you, it could plausibly have been a
piece of government disinformation intended to muddy the whole business --
what it effectively accomplished was to take the spotlight off the QLR and
other British troops in Basra and distance them from the Abu Ghraib
torture scandal which was at the time just breaking in the world press.
The new video shows just how important it was for the spotlight to be
shifted somewhere else.

Should it turn out
that the QLR was also involved in child-abuse, some one just might
want to go back and check out the real story behind those “hoaxed”
pictures.

There just might
bemore to it than what the government supposedly found.

(8) “3 more die in
Mideast, Israel takes arms ship,” Dispatch Online, May 8, 2001.
(9) “Seven Iraqis die in British custody. How many soldiers are charged?
None: This is not the first incident to involve the Queen's Lancashire
Regiment and allegations of brutality,” Andrew Johnson and Severin Carrell,
The Independent, 2 May 2004.